If Mike Mussina’s truly retiring, it’s the end of an era—for me. The Yankees won’t really miss him; his career in New York was close-but-not-good-enough, capped off by a playoff-less final season. He’ll be replaced in the rotation by some other big-name pitcher and forgotten as soon as the team wins a pennant, or at least the division. Meanwhile, Mussina himself seems rational about the decision. So why can’t I be?
Because Mussina was baseball to me, for the better part of two decades. His was the first star career that I watched unfold from start to finish. The guy that I’d rearrange my schedule to watch live, back in the heyday of Camden Yards. The only reason I wanted the Yankees to win the 2001 or 2003 World Series. The motivation behind fanatically refreshing the box score for a meaningless September game.
Like so many kids in Baltimore, I cheered for Mussina because he was the star of our town’s sole pro sports team; he didn’t have much competition among teenage boys, save an aging Cal Ripken (although female fans tended to prefer Brady Anderson). But after the Ravens came to town, after I moved away to Philly, and especially after Mussina left to play for the hated Yankees and incurred fans’ wrath…he was still my favorite.
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The sporting life
A handful of books–the really clever, timely, and especially lucky books–end up becoming “memes,” or ideas that gain some sort of cultural traction. Think “The World is Flat” or “The Wisdom of Crowds.” Heck, even “French Women Don’t Get Fat” is accepted shorthand.
It took several years and a vicious campaign, but Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 2005 book “Team of Rivals” is bidding for meme-dom, too. The story–exploring Lincoln’s bold decision to offer cabinet positions to men who despised him for winning the presidency each had sought–seemingly offers lessons for a divided, partisan America today. After all, Lincoln saved the union, thanks in no small part to opponents-turned-loyalists; who can quibble with that?
So even though a NYT Book Review dismissed the title as “uninspiring,” Goodwin’s “team of rivals” does have the simple, onomatopoeic-esque quality of all good memes, a perfect encapsulation and distillation of a theory to its essence. It’s a term that popped up in the spring, during talk of an Obama-Clinton ticket; it’s re-emerged now that Obama’s picking his cabinet, with his message of unity and post-party politics. Note the uptick in news pieces mentioning “team of rivals,” as shown below.
Intriguingly, it’s not just pundits calling on Obama to pick a team of rivals; the president-elect himself is reading the book “carefully,” close adviser Valerie Jarrett said on Meet the Press this week, and has previously hinted at adopting the model.
But…why would he want to do that?
We don’t use leeches for blood-letting; mail isn’t sent via the pony express. There are plenty of 1860s ideas that aren’t feasible 150 years later, and a true team of rivals is likely one of them. Note that there’s already been such a team this election season–and it dramatically flopped.
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Political chatter
